Concerns emerging on Common Core

I admit I'm a little late to the party and should have been paying attention before now. I've heard some chatter about Common Core and there were some things that concerned me, but overall (on the surface) the Common Core standards looked good and the intentions seemed noble. In the past week I have been shocked and dismayed at what I have discovered. And even more that, these things are not being discussed and were never disclosed to the public.

Did you know that you, as the parent, are told that you cannot opt your child out of the SBAC testing? Repeatedly I have been told there is no opt out option and the schools have no choice but to test all students because it's a "state and federal mandate." Even though this is a practice year and supposedly the scores will not be used, I'm told they must test my children. So why is it, in the supposed Land of the Free, I can't opt my child out of this testing? Turns out that 95 percent of all students need to be tested for the schools to receive federal funds. I guess that explains how Common Core was passed and accepted at unprecedented speed in 45 states! According to the school principals I spoke with, it "doesn't take many students opting out to fall below 95 percent."

So what happens when you start to follow the money? Why is this testing so important to the federal government? Did you know that these adaptive learning tests (meaning it's not a standard test, each child is answering different questions based on how they answered the previous question), are an essential component of the Common Core and are being used to create psychometric profiles of our children? The CEO of Knewton, Jose Ferreira, discussed this very thing at a White House symposium, Datapalooza, sponsored by the Department of Education in 2012 where he shared that student data is the most "mineable" data out there, and it far exceeds any data that is accessible via healthcare or any other industry.

In fact, Mr. Ferreira stated "we have more data about our students than any company has about anybody else, about anything, and it's not even close," (search Knewton Datapalooza on youtube for a video clip from this federally sponsored symposium: www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lr7Z7ysDluQ).

I find it a little alarming that this is a private company doing this under the oversight and encouragement of the federal government.

People are concerned about their privacy regarding medical information and how it can be used against them, but no one is talking about the privacy and manipulation our students are subjected to because of the information that is being collected via our schooling system; nor are there any safeguards as to how this information may be used in the future. I hope the citizens of Idaho do their own due diligence and demand safeguards for our children. I find the implications of this, and what this data can be used for in the future, to be frightening, and I am confident that most parents are completely unaware of this component of Common Core as I was prior to this week.

Barbara Geatches is a Rathdrum resident.